


Steady Enough To Hold You

by novelogical (writingmonsters)



Category: The Alienist (TV), The Alienist - Caleb Carr
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, I Couldn't Even Tell You What Goes On In This Fic, M/M, Please Do Not Leave Me Unsupervised With Prompts, Shaving Kink, There's Messy Emotions, There's Shaving and Kisses and Some Hurt/Comfort Basically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-13
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-07-11 17:51:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15977405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writingmonsters/pseuds/novelogical
Summary: John rinses the thin layer of lather from the razor with an expert hand, wipes it dry against the towel slung across Laszlo’s shoulder and says “oh, come now.” And he spreads his hand flat in the air before Laszlo, then, illustrates the firmness of his constitution. His hands do not shake. Not now. He is as sober as he ever could be. “My hands are steady enough for this.”Despite what you think, Laszlo Kreizler -- I am more than steady enough to bear the weight of you and all your perceived sins. All of your sorrows and faults and fears.If only you would let me.





	Steady Enough To Hold You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [misanthropiclycanthrope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/misanthropiclycanthrope/gifts).



> misanthropiclycanthrope said "shaving kink" and my brain said "stay up all night writing a thing".  
> I don't know, guys. It's a mess.

The gas lamps have just been lit along the streets, orange will o’ wisps burning in the blue-black fall of twilight, when John arrives on the front step of 283 East 17th Street. Laszlo’s calling card, with the note printed on good, thick paper had been delivered earlier that morning -- would John join him at the opera for Goldmark’s  _ Merlin _ ?

And for all that John loathes the opera, for all that he will be bored to tears and fidgeting in his seat before they reach intermezzo, he cannot deny Laszlo anything. Not if it will return some of the brightness to his sad, umber-dark eyes, not if it will afford him the chance to see Laszlo softened and smiling again.

It has been six months since Japheth Drury.

Six months, and John still suffers from the ocassional tremors in his hands -- a quavering in the muscles of his fingers that sets the pencil and charcoal wobbling across his page -- is still revisited by the nightmare visions of dead boys and mutilated eyeballs and Drury’s hunched and hulking figure in the low-lit tunnel of the waterworks.

He has seen little of Laszlo Kreizler, but he cannot imagine the man has fared much better. Immediately upon conclusion of the case, Laszlo had shut himself away in the Institute, had hardly spoken to any of them. By the end of it he had been wrung out, shattered, his own hard-beaten demons back to dogging his every step.

If a night at the opera means that Laszlo has found his way back to the light, has shored up and rebuilt his crumbled defenses against the world, then John will not be the one to deny him the pleasure.

It is Cyrus who answers the door when he rocks back on his heels, straightening the neat lapels of his coat. “Mister Moore,” there is a strange sort of look on his dark, hard-hewn face when he steps aside, ushering John into the foyer. “The doctor hasn’t been down yet.”

And that’s… unusual. Laszlo, who is so fastidious, always punctual --

John rolls his shoulders in the opera jacket that fits like a glove, almost too tight in its perfect snugness. “Well, I’ll just go up and hurry him along then, shall I?”

His verve does nothing to improve the uneasy stormcloud that lingers over Cyrus’s countenance. And that -- if nothing else could -- sets John’s heart to beating faster, the pulse of it crawling into his throat.

_ What has happened in this house? _

_ What has happened to _ Laszlo?

The path to Laszlo’s room within the sprawl of the elegant brownstone is a familiar one, a route John has traced a hundred thousand times before. He drifts up the stairs, along the corridor; the door is ajar. Left open just a crack, just enough that John catches the muffled “ _ scheiße _ !” from beyond.

The door sighs open beneath the faintest press of John’s hand. The tableau beyond stops him short.

Kreizler. Half-dressed in his evening suit and standing at the washbasin. The buttons of his shoes undone. Collar and bowtie discarded for a soft cloth, draped around his neck, chin tilted toward the shaving mirror, a thin line of blood welling along the column of his throat, and the straight razor trembling awkwardly in his left hand.

“Laszlo?” 

He blinks, gives a full-bodied twitch -- and John is grateful that the razor isn’t another inch closer to his cheek because the threat of self-inflicted wounds would have become a certainty -- and in a small, puzzled voice asks “John? What are you --?”

“It’s half past,” John informs him gently, stepping fully into Laszlo’s bedroom. Soft and comfortable as it is, there is still something painfully spartan to the space. “Or did you forget? The opera?  _ Merlin _ ?”

Without hesitation, John fits himself into the space at Laszlo’s side, lifts the corner of the towel to press against the trickle of blood from the razor’s nick.

Laszlo blinks again, a crease forming between his eyebrows. “I did not realize -- is it really so late already?” John feels his soft, mellifluous voice in the vibrations of his throat, humming against the palm of his hand. “I’m sorry. I had only thought to neaten myself before you came tonight, but…”

There is no need to say it. 

Mary was always the one to cut Laszlo’s hair, to shave and trim his beard, to help him button his boots and tie his cravat. And she is gone. There is no question that, were he only to ask, Cyrus would assist him -- but Laszlo is too damn stubborn. Is too damn proud. And so John has found him in this state of disarray, battling it out with his one good arm and the wounds to show for it.

He sighs, reaches out with his free hand to pluck the handle of the straight razor from Laszlo’s numb fingers. “For Christ’s sake, Laszlo. If you’re that insistent on a shave, let me do it -- that way I know you won’t carve your own face off in the process.”

“ _ John _ .”

John rinses the thin layer of lather from the razor with an expert hand, wipes it dry against the towel slung across Laszlo’s shoulder and says “oh, come now.” And he spreads his hand flat in the air before Laszlo, then, illustrates the firmness of his constitution. His hands do not shake. Not now. He is as sober as he ever could be. “My hands are steady enough for this.”

_ Despite what you think, Laszlo Kreizler -- I am more than steady enough to bear the weight of you and all your perceived sins. All of your sorrows and faults and fears. _

_ If only you would let me. _

There is something unhinged in the expression Laszlo turns on him, something fractured and wanting and frightened. Still so damaged. The case, Sara and her digging and her keen eye for insight, had wrenched Laszlo out of his careful safety. Had dragged the ugliness and the heartaches kicking and screaming into the light. John decides it is long past time the alienist found a bit of gentleness.

“All you ever have to do is ask, Laszlo.” And he cups the soft curve of Laszlo’s cheek, guides his head smoothly upwards. “Anything -- you know that. All you ever have to do is ask it of me.”

“I…” Laszlo’s slender mouth struggles with the words, ironing his lips together around the admission. He fixes his gaze upward, does not dare look John in the eye with the man so close, with the straight razor hovering against his jugular. “I wouldn’t know how…”

And that’s the rub, isn’t it?

Everything Laszlo knows, all his brilliance and his theories and his knowledge of the human psyche; and he has never known how to ask. Has never known how to need help without it being a failing -- a weakness.

John makes the first pass with the razor; a smooth rasp of the sharpened blade down the column of Laszlo’s pale, vulnerable throat. 

The sound of it, the sudden stillness of Laszlo beneath his touch, the warmth of his breath agaisnt the inside of John’s wrist -- he may have turned the razor and cut himself to the quick.  _ Oh, _ he thinks.  _ Oh, Laszlo. What are you doing to me? _

His free hand tugs at Laszlo’s hip, draws him around so they are back-to-front in the shaving mirror, John with his head tucked over Laszlo’s shoulder, watching in the mirror as he maneuver’s the alienist’s head this way and that, wipes the stray hairs from the straight razor and scrapes another careful line through the fine soap-lather beneath Laszlo’s ear. “Here,” he says against the alienist’s cheek. “Look at yourself.”

Another pass of the razor and Laszlo’s eyelids flutter, a fan of dark lashes against his cheeks. His lips part faintly. A sigh. “ _ John _ .” 

John rinses the razor. Draws his thumb along the line of Laszlo’s beard, the angle of it shaped into the curve of his cheek, feels the prickle of the new growth there. The patches where the razor has missed. The illustrator’s calluses rough on his thumb and forefinger catch at Laszlo’s beard, drag against the smoothness of his cheek.

“This is what it looks like,” he tells Laszlo’s wide-eyed reflection in the mirror “when you are taken care of. When someone cares  _ for  _ you.”

And he watches their reflected doubles. Sees it in Laszlo’s face at the same moment he feels some of the tension, the self-recrimination bleeding from his spine. The way it softens his shoulders and sets him curling inward, bracing himself against John who is there to hold him steady, to shore him up.

“Hold still,” John insists, cupping Laszlo’s chin in the cradle of his palm. Laszlo fits so securely against him, makes such a perfect image caught up in his arms -- John wants to photograph it. Wants to sketch it out and smudge the charcoal shadows of Laszlo’s features so familiar he can draw them from memory alone.

He draws the skin taut, neatens the line of Laszlo’s cheek with a few delicate strokes. And when he tips Laszlo’s head to the other side, he cannot help but steal a quick brush of his lips against the freshly shaved cheek. It startles a flush out of Laszlo, leaves him pink and breathing shallowly between softly parted lips.

John says softly into the sweet-smelling wisps of his hair “you have never been alone, Laszlo.” A final scrape of the razor. Beautiful, lovely Laszlo watching him so keenly in the mirror. “All you ever had to do was ask.”

The ghost of his breath against Laszlo’s skin earns him a shiver. A delicious, slow shudder that rolls through the compact body braced against his own. They are, neither of them, unaffected -- that much is clear. From the desire that grows obvious, low and aching in John’s belly. From the darkness of Laszlo’s eyes, the hitch in his breath. The way his trousers have grown tight when John slides his free hand lower.

Laszlo considers his words. Considers the weight and warmth between them, the way John curves his solid, lanky body into him, presses low against his spine. “And if I ask now?”

John rucks up the corner of the towel around Laszlo’s shoulders, wipes away the lather of soap and stubble for a final time even as he bends to press a kiss to the vulnerable, sweet place behind the hinge of Laszlo’s jaw. “Anything.”

“Kiss me,” Laszlo’s voice creaks. Cracks. Threatens to shatter. “Properly.”

John thinks  _ gladly  _ and turns Laszlo in the cradle of his arms, catching the dear, serious face in his hands. He draws the pads of his thumbs across the swell of Laszlo’s cheekbones, presses their foreheads together so that he can breathe in the smell of soap and Laszlo’s faint, fragrant spice. “Yes,” he sighs into the hair’s breadth between them. “Always.”

He kisses him tenderly, carefully -- threads his fingers into the unfashionable length of the alienist’s dark hair. Cradles his skull. Kisses him as though he is precious. The sound Laszlo yields up against his lips is holy.

“Damn the opera,” John murmurs, the words crushed against Laszlo’s mouth. “We aren’t going. Damn the whole business -- it’s a good thing you didn’t manage to dress after all.”

It might be a laugh, the broken-off noise muffled between them. It might be a sob.

Laszlo shatters so softly against him.


End file.
